I think the enclosed might be a decent basis on which to construct a
(fairly simple) tool?
At 08:11 PM 1/31/01 -0800, Joshua Allen wrote [on the RDF IG list]:
>...the semantic web should be *inclusive*, IMO. That is, anyone can
>publish metadata, and you
>should be able to choose to "trust" content based on any definition of
>community that you wish. Just like you should be able to categorize in
>different ways.
>
>Here is a scenario to describe what I mean:
>
>1. You are browsing the web, and you see a page that you think is good. You
>have a thumbs-up and thumbs-down toolbar buttons in your browser toolbar.
>You click "thumbs-up", and a small XML packet containing your e-mail
>address, the URL in question, and your metadata gets silently sent
>somewhere.
>
>2. Somewhere is a server containing your information and a set of groups to
>which you belong. Membership in the groups could be decided in a manner
>similar to advogato [http://www.advogato.org/], free to all, or however
>the person creating the group
>wished. Anyone could create groups. You could use some UI at this server
>to rank any groups you were interested in and weight how much you trust or
>distrust each group's metadata.
>
>3. Periodically, maybe every hour or so, each metadata collection server
>(where you sent the xml packet) aggregates the metadata based on how many of
>each metadata value were sent by members of each group. The aggregates are
>sent to various services that have subscribed to the metadata (google and
>hotbot, for example).
>
>4. You do a google search on certain keywords, and the results are
>automatically ranked to show those results that you would find the most
>trustworthy, and filter out those that you did not trust, all without ever
>having to modify the original pages.
>
>[Note that nothing about this example claims that the "metadata collection
>servers" have to _only_ collect "sucks/rules" info about pages, or that
>subscribers have to subscribe to _all_ of the metadata or have it aggregated
>by groups, or that the "metadata servers" have to be centralized, controlled
>by one organization, etc.]
>
>IMO, this is one of the major underlying visions of the SW.
--
Love.
ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE